Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 8

Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Bit

Bit
The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name
is a portmanteau of binary digit.[1] The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible
values. These values are most commonly represented as either "1" or "0", but other representations
such as true/false, yes/no, on/off, or +/− are also widely used.

The relation between these values and the physical states of the underlying storage or device is a
matter of convention, and different assignments may be used even within the same device or
program. It may be physically implemented with a two-state device.

A contiguous group of binary digits is commonly called a bit string, a bit vector, or a single-
dimensional (or multi-dimensional) bit array. A group of eight bits is called one byte, but
historically the size of the byte is not strictly defined.[2] Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple
words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a
nibble.

In information theory, one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1
with equal probability,[3] or the information that is gained when the value of such a variable
becomes known.[4][5] As a unit of information, the bit is also known as a shannon,[6] named after
Claude E. Shannon.

The symbol for the binary digit is either "bit", per the IEC 80000-13:2008 standard, or the
lowercase character "b", per the IEEE 1541-2002 standard. Use of the latter may create confusion
with the capital "B" which is the international standard symbol for the byte.

History
The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon
and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1804), and later adopted
by Semyon Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Herman Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like
IBM. A variant of that idea was the perforated paper tape. In all those systems, the medium (card
or tape) conceptually carried an array of hole positions; each position could be either punched
through or not, thus carrying one bit of information. The encoding of text by bits was also used in
Morse code (1844) and early digital communications machines such as teletypes and stock ticker
machines (1870).

Ralph Hartley suggested the use of a logarithmic measure of information in 1928.[7] Claude E.
Shannon first used the word "bit" in his seminal 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of
Communication".[8][9][10] He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had written a Bell Labs
memo on 9 January 1947 in which he contracted "binary information digit" to simply "bit".[8]

Physical representation

1 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

A bit can be stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in either of two possible
distinct states. These may be the two stable states of a flip-flop, two positions of an electrical
switch, two distinct voltage or current levels allowed by a circuit, two distinct levels of light
intensity, two directions of magnetization or polarization, the orientation of reversible double
stranded DNA, etc.

Bits can be implemented in several forms. In most modern computing devices, a bit is usually
represented by an electrical voltage or current pulse, or by the electrical state of a flip-flop circuit.

For devices using positive logic, a digit value of 1 (or a logical value of true) is represented by a
more positive voltage relative to the representation of 0. Different logic families require different
voltages, and variations are allowed to account for component aging and noise immunity. For
example, in transistor–transistor logic (TTL) and compatible circuits, digit values 0 and 1 at the
output of a device are represented by no higher than 0.4 volts and no lower than 2.6 volts,
respectively; while TTL inputs are specified to recognize 0.8 volts or below as 0 and 2.2 volts or
above as 1.

Transmission and processing

Bits are transmitted one at a time in serial transmission, and by a multiple number of bits in
parallel transmission. A bitwise operation optionally processes bits one at a time. Data transfer
rates are usually measured in decimal SI multiples of the unit bit per second (bit/s), such as kbit/s.

Storage

In the earliest non-electronic information processing devices, such as Jacquard's loom or


Babbage's Analytical Engine, a bit was often stored as the position of a mechanical lever or gear, or
the presence or absence of a hole at a specific point of a paper card or tape. The first electrical
devices for discrete logic (such as elevator and traffic light control circuits, telephone switches, and
Konrad Zuse's computer) represented bits as the states of electrical relays which could be either
"open" or "closed". When relays were replaced by vacuum tubes, starting in the 1940s, computer
builders experimented with a variety of storage methods, such as pressure pulses traveling down a
mercury delay line, charges stored on the inside surface of a cathode-ray tube, or opaque spots
printed on glass discs by photolithographic techniques.

In the 1950s and 1960s, these methods were largely supplanted by magnetic storage devices such
as magnetic-core memory, magnetic tapes, drums, and disks, where a bit was represented by the
polarity of magnetization of a certain area of a ferromagnetic film, or by a change in polarity from
one direction to the other. The same principle was later used in the magnetic bubble memory
developed in the 1980s, and is still found in various magnetic strip items such as metro tickets and
some credit cards.

In modern semiconductor memory, such as dynamic random-access memory, the two values of a
bit may be represented by two levels of electric charge stored in a capacitor. In certain types of
programmable logic arrays and read-only memory, a bit may be represented by the presence or
absence of a conducting path at a certain point of a circuit. In optical discs, a bit is encoded as the
presence or absence of a microscopic pit on a reflective surface. In one-dimensional bar codes, bits
are encoded as the thickness of alternating black and white lines.

2 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

Unit and symbol


The bit is not defined in the International System of Units (SI). However, the International
Electrotechnical Commission issued standard IEC 60027, which specifies that the symbol for
binary digit should be 'bit', and this should be used in all multiples, such as 'kbit', for kilobit.[11]
However, the lower-case letter 'b' is widely used as well and was recommended by the IEEE 1541
Standard (2002). In contrast, the upper case letter 'B' is the standard and customary symbol for
byte.

Multiple-bit units
Multiple bits Decimal Binary
Value Metric Value IEC JEDEC
Multiple bits may be expressed and
represented in several ways. For 1000 kbit kilobit 1024 Kibit kibibit Kbit Kb kilobit
convenience of representing commonly 10002 Mbit megabit 10242 Mibit mebibit Mbit Mb megabit
reoccurring groups of bits in information 10003 Gbit gigabit 10243 Gibit gibibit Gbit Gb gigabit
technology, several units of information 10004 Tbit terabit 10244 Tibit tebibit —
have traditionally been used. The most 10005 Pbit petabit 5
1024 Pibit pebibit —
common is the unit byte, coined by
10006 Ebit exabit 6
1024 Eibit exbibit —
Werner Buchholz in June 1956, which
10007 Zbit zettabit 10247 Zibit zebibit —
historically was used to represent the 8 Ybit yottabit
1000 1024 8 Yibit yobibit —
group of bits used to encode a single
1000 9 Rbit ronnabit —
character of text (until UTF-8 multibyte
10 —
encoding took over) in a computer[2][12] 1000 Qbit quettabit
[13][14][15] and for this reason it was used Orders of magnitude of data
as the basic addressable element in many
computer architectures. The trend in hardware design converged on the most common
implementation of using eight bits per byte, as it is widely used today. However, because of the
ambiguity of relying on the underlying hardware design, the unit octet was defined to explicitly
denote a sequence of eight bits.

Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "words". Like
the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically
between 8 and 80 bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the 21st century, retail
personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64 bits.

The International System of Units defines a series of decimal prefixes for multiples of standardized
units which are commonly also used with the bit and the byte. The prefixes kilo (103) through yotta
(1024) increment by multiples of one thousand, and the corresponding units are the kilobit (kbit)
through the yottabit (Ybit).

Information capacity and information compression


When the information capacity of a storage system or a communication channel is presented in bits
or bits per second, this often refers to binary digits, which is a computer hardware capacity to store
binary data (0 or 1, up or down, current or not, etc.).[16] Information capacity of a storage system is
only an upper bound to the quantity of information stored therein. If the two possible values of
one bit of storage are not equally likely, that bit of storage contains less than one bit of information.

3 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

If the value is completely predictable, then the reading of that value provides no information at all
(zero entropic bits, because no resolution of uncertainty occurs and therefore no information is
available). If a computer file that uses n bits of storage contains only m < n bits of information,
then that information can in principle be encoded in about m bits, at least on the average. This
principle is the basis of data compression technology. Using an analogy, the hardware binary digits
refer to the amount of storage space available (like the number of buckets available to store things),
and the information content the filling, which comes in different levels of granularity (fine or
coarse, that is, compressed or uncompressed information). When the granularity is finer—when
information is more compressed—the same bucket can hold more.

For example, it is estimated that the combined technological capacity of the world to store
information provides 1,300 exabytes of hardware digits. However, when this storage space is filled
and the corresponding content is optimally compressed, this only represents 295 exabytes of
information.[17] When optimally compressed, the resulting carrying capacity approaches Shannon
information or information entropy.[16]

Bit-based computing
Certain bitwise computer processor instructions (such as bit set) operate at the level of
manipulating bits rather than manipulating data interpreted as an aggregate of bits.

In the 1980s, when bitmapped computer displays became popular, some computers provided
specialized bit block transfer instructions to set or copy the bits that corresponded to a given
rectangular area on the screen.

In most computers and programming languages, when a bit within a group of bits, such as a byte
or word, is referred to, it is usually specified by a number from 0 upwards corresponding to its
position within the byte or word. However, 0 can refer to either the most or least significant bit
depending on the context.

Other information units


Similar to torque and energy in physics; information-theoretic information and data storage size
have the same dimensionality of units of measurement, but there is in general no meaning to
adding, subtracting or otherwise combining the units mathematically, although one may act as a
bound on the other.

Units of information used in information theory include the shannon (Sh), the natural unit of
information (nat) and the hartley (Hart). One shannon is the maximum amount of information
needed to specify the state of one bit of storage. These are related by 1 Sh ≈ 0.693 nat ≈ 0.301 Hart.

Some authors also define a binit as an arbitrary information unit equivalent to some fixed but
unspecified number of bits.[18]

See also
Byte
Integer (computer science)

4 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

Primitive data type


Trit (Trinary digit)
Qubit (quantum bit)
Bitstream
Entropy (information theory)
Bit rate and baud rate
Binary numeral system
Ternary numeral system
Shannon (unit)
Nibble

References
1. Mackenzie, Charles E. (1980). Coded Character Sets, History and Development (https://book
s.google.com/books?id=6-tQAAAAMAAJ). The Systems Programming Series (1 ed.). Addison-
Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. p. x. ISBN 978-0-201-14460-4. LCCN 77-90165 (https://lccn.l
oc.gov/77-90165). Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20161118230039/https://books.googl
e.com/books?id=6-tQAAAAMAAJ) from the original on 2016-11-18. Retrieved 2016-05-22. [1]
(https://web.archive.org/web/20160526172151/https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mack
enzie_CodedCharSets.pdf)
2. Bemer, Robert William (2000-08-08). "Why is a byte 8 bits? Or is it?" (https://web.archive.org/w
eb/20170403130829/http://www.bobbemer.com/BYTE.HTM). Computer History Vignettes.
Archived from the original (http://www.bobbemer.com/BYTE.HTM) on 2017-04-03. Retrieved
2017-04-03. "[…] With IBM's STRETCH computer as background, handling 64-character words
divisible into groups of 8 (I designed the character set for it, under the guidance of Dr. Werner
Buchholz, the man who DID coin the term "byte" for an 8-bit grouping). […] The IBM 360 used
8-bit characters, although not ASCII directly. Thus Buchholz's "byte" caught on everywhere. I
myself did not like the name for many reasons. […]"
3. Anderson, John B.; Johnnesson, Rolf (2006), Understanding Information Transmission
4. Haykin, Simon (2006), Digital Communications
5. IEEE Std 260.1-2004
6. "Units: B" (https://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictB.html#bit). Archived (https://web.archive.org/
web/20160504055432/http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictB.html#bit) from the original on
2016-05-04.
7. Abramson, Norman (1963). Information theory and coding. McGraw-Hill.
8. Shannon, Claude Elwood (July 1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (https://we
b.archive.org/web/19980715013250/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon
1948.pdf) (PDF). Bell System Technical Journal. 27 (3): 379–423. doi:10.1002/j.
1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x (https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fj.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x). hdl:
11858/00-001M-0000-002C-4314-2 (https://hdl.handle.net/11858%2F00-001M-0000-002C-431
4-2). Archived from the original (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon194
8.pdf) (PDF) on 1998-07-15. "The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a
unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary
digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey."

5 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

9. Shannon, Claude Elwood (October 1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Bell
System Technical Journal. 27 (4): 623–666. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb00917.x (https://d
oi.org/10.1002%2Fj.1538-7305.1948.tb00917.x). hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-002C-4314-2 (http
s://hdl.handle.net/11858%2F00-001M-0000-002C-4314-2).
10. Shannon, Claude Elwood; Weaver, Warren (1949). A Mathematical Theory of Communication
(https://web.archive.org/web/19980715013250/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonda
y/shannon1948.pdf) (PDF). University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-72548-4. Archived from the
original (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf) (PDF) on
1998-07-15.
11. National Institute of Standards and Technology (2008), Guide for the Use of the International
System of Units. Online version. (http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/sp811.pdf) Archived (https://we
b.archive.org/web/20160603203340/http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/sp811.pdf) 3 June 2016 at
the Wayback Machine
12. Buchholz, Werner (1956-06-11). "7. The Shift Matrix" (http://archive.computerhistory.org/resour
ces/text/IBM/Stretch/pdfs/06-07/102632284.pdf) (PDF). The Link System. IBM. pp. 5–6. Stretch
Memo No. 39G. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20170404152534/http://archive.comput
erhistory.org/resources/text/IBM/Stretch/pdfs/06-07/102632284.pdf) (PDF) from the original on
2017-04-04. Retrieved 2016-04-04. "[…] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will
be the ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long […] the Shift Matrix to be
used to convert a 60-bit word, coming from Memory in parallel, into characters, or "bytes" as
we have called them, to be sent to the Adder serially. The 60 bits are dumped into magnetic
cores on six different levels. Thus, if a 1 comes out of position 9, it appears in all six cores
underneath. […] The Adder may accept all or only some of the bits. […] Assume that it is
desired to operate on 4 bit decimal digits, starting at the right. The 0-diagonal is pulsed first,
sending out the six bits 0 to 5, of which the Adder accepts only the first four (0-3). Bits 4 and 5
are ignored. Next, the 4 diagonal is pulsed. This sends out bits 4 to 9, of which the last two are
again ignored, and so on. […] It is just as easy to use all six bits in alphanumeric work, or to
handle bytes of only one bit for logical analysis, or to offset the bytes by any number of bits.
[…]"

6 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

13. Buchholz, Werner (February 1977). "The Word "Byte" Comes of Age..." (https://archive.org/stre
am/byte-magazine-1977-02/1977_02_BYTE_02-02_Usable_Systems#page/n145/mode/2up)
Byte Magazine. 2 (2): 144. "[…] The first reference found in the files was contained in an
internal memo written in June 1956 during the early days of developing Stretch. A byte was
described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was
assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use was in the context of the
input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time. The possibility of going
to 8 bit bytes was considered in August 1956 and incorporated in the design of Stretch shortly
thereafter. The first published reference to the term occurred in 1959 in a paper "Processing
Data in Bits and Pieces" by G A Blaauw, F P Brooks Jr and W Buchholz in the IRE
Transactions on Electronic Computers, June 1959, page 121. The notions of that paper were
elaborated in Chapter 4 of Planning a Computer System (Project Stretch), edited by
W Buchholz, McGraw-Hill Book Company (1962). The rationale for coining the term was
explained there on page 40 as follows:
Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in
parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a
given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and
different codes may use different numbers of bits (ie, different byte sizes). In input-output
transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual
characters. (The term is coined from bite, but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit.)
System/360 took over many of the Stretch concepts, including the basic byte and word sizes,
which are powers of 2. For economy, however, the byte size was fixed at the 8 bit maximum,
and addressing at the bit level was replaced by byte addressing. […]"
14. Blaauw, Gerrit Anne; Brooks, Jr., Frederick Phillips; Buchholz, Werner (1962), "Chapter 4:
Natural Data Units" (https://web.archive.org/web/20170403014651/http://archive.computerhisto
ry.org/resources/text/IBM/Stretch/pdfs/Buchholz_102636426.pdf) (PDF), in Buchholz, Werner
(ed.), Planning a Computer System – Project Stretch, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. / The
Maple Press Company, York, PA., pp. 39–40, LCCN 61-10466 (https://lccn.loc.gov/61-10466),
archived from the original (http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/IBM/Stretch/pdfs/B
uchholz_102636426.pdf) (PDF) on 2017-04-03, retrieved 2017-04-03
15. Bemer, Robert William (1959). "A proposal for a generalized card code of 256 characters" (http
s://doi.org/10.1145%2F368424.368435). Communications of the ACM. 2 (9): 19–23. doi:
10.1145/368424.368435 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F368424.368435). S2CID 36115735 (http
s://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:36115735).
16. Information in small bits (https://informationinsmallbits.com/) Information in Small Bits is a book
produced as part of a non-profit outreach project of the IEEE Information Theory Society. The
book introduces Claude Shannon and basic concepts of Information Theory to children 8 and
older using relatable cartoon stories and problem-solving activities.
17. "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information" (http
s://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1200970) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2013
0727161911/http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6025/60) 2013-07-27 at the Wayback
Machine, especially Supporting online material (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1
200970) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110531133712/http://www.sciencemag.org/co
ntent/suppl/2011/02/08/science.1200970.DC1/Hilbert-SOM.pdf) 2011-05-31 at the Wayback
Machine, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López (2011), Science, 332(6025), 60-65; free access to
the article through here: martinhilbert.net/WorldInfoCapacity.html
18. Bhattacharya, Amitabha (2005). Digital Communication (https://books.google.com/books?id=0
CI8bd0upS4C&pg=PR20). Tata McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 978-0-07059117-2. Archived (htt
ps://web.archive.org/web/20170327011019/https://books.google.com/books?id=0CI8bd0upS4
C&pg=PR20&lpg=PR20) from the original on 2017-03-27.

7 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30
Bit - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

External links
Bit Calculator (https://web.archive.org/web/20090216151053/http://www.bit-calculator.com/) – a
tool providing conversions between bit, byte, kilobit, kilobyte, megabit, megabyte, gigabit,
gigabyte
BitXByteConverter (http://nxu.biz/tools/BitXByteConverter/) – a tool for computing file sizes,
storage capacity, and digital information in various units

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bit&oldid=1208455990"

8 од 8 22.2.2024. 16:30

You might also like